On Not Caring About Stemming the Tide of Mainline Decline
January 12, 2012
It appears that Anglicans are really quite talented at creating entire cottage industries around problems of identity. Books about “Anglican Identity” and “What is Anglicanism?” abound in numbers far greater than you may at first imagine. I feel as though, if one is allowed to judge by certain internet circles, we are about to start on a whole new creation when finally – about 30 years too late – we get around to addressing the “problem” of “mainline decline.”
The facts are…
- We’re getting older
- We’re getting smaller
- We’re getting poorer
- We’re getting less and less important in our social stature
Well, WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO ABOUT IT!!!????
- Should we eschew hierarchy?
- Should we come up with THE missional strategy?
- Should we maybe wear khakis to preach?
- Should we mess with the liturgies? Make God more feminine; black; expansive; Celtic; relevant?
Now, these are not all merely banal questions (though perhaps some are), but I would like to suggest that so long as the beginning and focal point of the discussion is centered around decline and “stemming the tide,” then we’ve already failed.
This line of reasoning puts us immediately in a reactionary position. “What are we going to do about this threat? (This too is where the “identity fetish” creeps in. Constantly going in circles trying to fence the boundaries of identity means that less and less do we care to look to Jesus to judge what we think it important about our identity).
It also creates an atmosphere where even practices and beliefs that are very good are swept aside by the well-meaning or self-proclaimed “prophets” and “reformers.”
What often goes overlooked is how deeply institutional this line of reasoning is, and how ironic it is that these questions are often under the guise of being “anti-institutional.” Concern about numbers and colleges and seminaries and ages are all very institutional issues. (Though, far be it from me to be anti-institutional.)
Allow me to suggest that whether numbers are waxing or waning, the primary issue ought to be one of praying, working, longing, to be faithful to our Lord and faithful to the proclamation of the Gospel. I know this might seem just empty and pious word-mixing. The point I’m trying to make, though, isn’t about out-piousing anybody, but about shifting the seat of discernment from one of reactionary concern about structures to a positive freedom to love and worship our Lord and love our neighbor without concern for “maintaining” the Episcopal Church.
Doing otherwise evinces a deep lack of faith. As if somehow Christ isn’t risen and it’s up to us to pick up the Church by her bootstraps and keep her going! (Thus, even now the pelagian shadow of liberal protestantism lurks behind every question and every answer)
I think we could all stand to learn from people like Derek Olsen, who when prodded on the question of a drop in numbers responds not by saying what ought to go in order to stop the bleeding, but by pointing out what ought not be negotiable because they are the things that help to keep us faithful to the Gospel that we’ve received. Or +Rowan Williams who concludes his astounding essay “God” in this way:
“In a church that is in many ways deeply wedded to ‘territorial’ preoccupations, it is unlikely that the gift and promise of the non-territorial God will be clearly discernible. In other words, a church that is concerned about its internal politics will not transform the political in the way that is in fact made possible by Jesus. The desire to secure purity and control in the Church (which can be a preoccupation as much of ‘progressives’ as of ‘traditionalists’) looks to a territory in which believers may see in one another a reassuring sameness; and when believers are looking at one another to test that assurance, they are less likely to be attending to the foundational absence on which the life of the community rests. And if the contemplative life is central in some way to the integrity of the Church at large, it is because of this: not to point to ‘values’ above and beyond the concerns of the world, not to pass judgment on the unspiritual conflicts of the Church or society, but to witness to the way in which a life may be constructed in which all acts are referrable to God and in which the consequent ‘deregionalizing’ of the life of the spirit, life before God, impacts increasingly upon the understanding of prayer. It is to do with the poverty and wealth of the everyday; with the fullness and emptiness of faith.”
Anglican Identities: Archbishop of Canterbury Michael Ramsey
August 14, 2010
After his retirement, ++Ramsey spent much of his time at Nashotah House Seminary. At the time there was a nearby home for the mentally handicapped. One day a resident of that home ‘escaped’ and police were looking for him. Also on that day, Michael Ramsey was taking a walk in his full purple cassock. Seeing a very hairy man in a long purple ‘dress’ the police stopped him on his walk and asked who he was. ++Ramsey replied, “Why I’m the Archbishop of Canterbury!”
I just wanted to throw that story in there. It doesn’t really serve a larger purpose in this post.
It has often been noted that most who have taken the name Cantaur have been less than the greatest minds of the Anglican Church, but somehow the last century has produced three ABCs about whom has been said, “He is the most theologically astute ABC since St. Anselm himself.” I cannot judge such sayings, but at the very least, Michael Ramsey stands alongside William Temple and Rowan Williams as a creative and original theologian in his own right.
At this point I’ve not read as much Ramsey as I should like to. But even what I have is enough to excite me to read more. His classic theological work is The Gospel and the Catholic Church; a book written very early in his academic career and one that has apparently had a mixed reception. Ramsey was writing this in an Anglican school system very much dedicated to the liberalism of its time yet also when Barth was starting to be read and the “Biblical Theology” movement was coming into its own. It is remarkable the sheer amount of theology that is crammed into this thing. From the first chapter Ramsey is quick to remove any sense of worldly ‘purpose’ from his ecclesiology; the Church is made and has its life only in the life death and resurrection of Christ. It doesn’t play chaplain to the State, neither is it there to spread progressive values.
But this is also a mysterious participatory life. Here Ramsey is well ahead of his time for a Protestant. It may have been his deep appreciation of the Eastern Orthodox and/or his refusal to ‘rationalize’ how the New Testament talks about Gods life in the Church, whatever influenced Ramsey, he envisioned the Church as in the process of theosis.
But this forms only the beginning to this work. From there Ramsey attempts to explicate church order and unity, the episcopacy and apostolic succession in light of this Passion as opposed to locating it in the predetermined discussions as they have been developed. For him ‘Christian authority consists not in propositions about God [or, presumably the Church], but in God’s own redemptive action.” This is a section I should like to work on in the future: teasing out how the structure of the Church ought to be reflective of its life given by God in Christ. This section of the work is among the most novel and creative.
The next part of the book consists in a series of three essays of historical theology exploring the “Church of the Fathers,” including both the Greek and Latin fathers; “Developments in Catholicism,” in which he critiques the Roman Catholic Church for what he sees as certain discontinuities; and “The Reformers and the Church.” Ramsey was very much a sensitive reader of the Reformers and though himself often (and correctly) identified by others as “Anglo-catholic,” he was passionate that the Gospel and it alone stood at the heart of the Church.
In the next to last chapter Ramsey talks about the “Ecclesia Anglicana” and (typically) locates it both in the Reformation but also, on account of it’s historic order, within the intents of the Catholic Church. He here has a great little section on F.D. Maurice.
In a concluding note Ramsey returns again as he did throughout to the topic of Christian reunion, which for him cannot occur except as the Gospel is more and more ingested into the Church.
This work easily sums up the reason I feel so at home in Anglicanism. As with any church, in practice we are mixed, but at its best Anglican theological reflection usually follows this exact order: You must begin in the Scriptures; however authoritative and valuable the developments of history, Scripture (as it testifies to Christ) forms the heart of how we think of ourselves; then you move to the Church Fathers who still (providentially?) form a paradigm for integrating spirituality and philosophy into an holistic theology; but both the medieval church and the Reformation church have a rightful place even if both must be integrated with a tad bit more attentiveness; and it is only after this that we ought to begin to talk about the ‘Anglican Church’ and identity. The mixing of the universal and the particular are perhaps one of the reasons that Anglicans have not historically excelled in systematics but rather in devotional theology.
But that’s mere speculation. Whatever the case, by this book as well as his Anglican Spirit and An Era in Anglican Theology From Gore to Temple: The Development of Anglican Theology from ‘Lux Mundi’ and the Second World War 1889-1939, the 100th Archbishop of Canterbury has taught me how to feel at home in the Episcopal Church even when sometimes I still feel like a baby Anglican.
Other important works of his include: (please leave comments with others)
The Glory of God and the Transfiguration of Christ
A great starting point with secondary literature is Glory Descending: Michael Ramsey and His Writings and Glory!. Owen Chadwick also composed this biography.
Anglican Identities
August 10, 2010
So often in much contemporary Anglican disagreement, one hears that one or another position or action is “not Anglican;” as if there is a predetermined and widely understood notion of what is Anglican and what is not. More often than not these Anglican ‘identities’ are warmed over secondary reflection on how Anglicanism is ‘inclusive – “We don’t have a confession” – or ‘Protestant’ – “remember the Articles of Religion?” or whatever. Rarely have I found such cheap appeals convincing, and drawing from historical wells for invective has always produced less-than-complete pictures of our Christian past.
In his helpful little book, The Anglican Spirit, Michael Ramsey explains that there has seemed to be a general inability for Anglicanism to maintain anything like a coherent identity since WWII. He points to several different reasons, among them the rise of optimistic ecumenism and the ‘Biblical Theology’ movement. We see that this has carried on and accelerated up to the present debates surrounding authority, autonomy and theological revision.
On the one hand, it can become quite (for lack of a better word) ‘idolatrous’ to put an abstract ‘Anglican’ identity before the Gospel, yet so long as an appropriate perspective is kept, just as it makes perfect sense to talk about ‘Ignation spirituality’ within the Catholic Church as a distinctive vein, it makes sense to speak of Anglicanism as a worthy part of the larger Tradition and as something valuable enough to retain.
But ‘identity’ is always something being constructed from memory, reflection and imagination. It arises organically from going over the sources that feed us. To figure out what such an identity might look like, it is better to go back and read the Tractarians, Hooker, Herbert rather than latch on to something like ‘comprehensiveness’ and try to fill it with meaning.
‘Identity making’ is in the end worthless since as the Church we receive our identity always from God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and not from the efforts of our own devising. Nevertheless God has so made it that our lives are mediated by the stuff of this world, and so distinctive ‘cultures’ are not perversions of a transcendent universal standing over and above our existence, as if transfiguration had nothing to do with the ‘stuff’ of the world, but parts of a whole.
So we are going to offer a meager addition to this reflection. Each of us is going to compose a short post about an Anglican thinker who has affected us significantly in hopes of renewing interest in our primary sources. And soon we are going to add a new page, open to constant expansion, where we hope to list contemporary Anglican thinkers; where they teach and maybe some of what they’ve written; all in hopes that in attention to the particular we might understand more of the universal, and might get a better feel for how God is working among us today.
Tony Hunt
jstambaugh
Shawn Wamsley
